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‘Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8…’

“What constitutes a friend? In everyday vernacular, a friend is a relationship that involves some degree of mutual love or admiration.”
I do not believe that this definition of friend has changed. Almost every post I have read in this forum so far has admitted that they do not consider every ‘Facebook friend’ an actual friend. The term ‘Friend’ online does not mean the same thing in the social media game. In an effort to avoid the same pointless drama that a MySpace caused, Facebook was smart enough to say, forget all that nonsense, everyone will just have to be under the same term, ‘Friend’, we’ll leave it to the user to decide if they want to add or accept. When I talk about my Facebook, maybe I saw something funny on the newsfeed, I don’t always say oh my friend -insert name- posted a funny video. More than likely I would say in conversation to an actual friend in person, ‘oh I was on Facebook last night and saw this funny video that some guy I graduated high school with posted.’ I don’t have a Facebook, or any social network site, to increase my number of friends, nor do I care to have large numbers. Most people have better priorities than that. I use the social network sites for exactly that, social networks. Even in everyday face-to-face relationships, the people in our live social network, are not all friends, so why would/should it be any different online. Maybe you met the person once or twice so you added each other, who knows, maybe because they could be a good point of reference for something in the future. If in an unknown period of time you end up never connecting with that person in your network ever again, then you delete them. End of story, nobody needs to cry over it. Just like in the real world, if you don’t like someone and you don’t want to be their friend, no one says you have to, you decide to accept or decline. There are as many people in real life as online.